The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (149 page)

“Hey, Buck,” she said. “Don’t be shy. Ask whatever’s on your mind.”

“Oh, shit. Never mind.”

“You know what they called me in high school? Fort Knox. You know why? Because I wouldn’t let anyone in my pants.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” Martha Knox poked at the fire with a twig, then threw the twig in. She moved the coffee pot away from the flames and tapped the side of it with a spoon to settle the grounds that were boiling. “Why not? Because I didn’t think it was a very good idea.”

“That’s a hell of a nickname.”

“Buck’s a better one.”

“Taken,” I said.

Martha Knox got up and went into the tent, and when she came out she had an armful of wood. I asked, “What are you doing?”

“The fire is almost dead.”

“So let it die. It’s late.”

She didn’t answer me.

“I have to get up at three-thirty tomorrow morning,” I said.

“So good night.”

“And so do you have to get up.”

Martha Knox put a stick on the fire and sat down. “Buck,” she said, “don’t be a baby.” She took a long drink and she sang, “Mama, don’t let your cowboys grow up to be babies . . .”

“That’s a Crosby line,” I said.

“Let me ask you something, Buck. When we’re done up here, let me go hunting with you and Crosby.”

“I don’t think my old man would be crazy about that.”

“I didn’t ask to go hunting with your old man.”

“He won’t like it.”

“Why?”

“You ever even shoot a gun?”

“Sure. When I was a little kid my parents sent me out to Montana to stay with my dad’s uncle for the summer. I called my folks after a few weeks and said, ‘Uncle Earl set up a coffee can on a log and let me shoot at it and I hit the goddamn thing six times.’ They made me come home early. Didn’t like the sound of that.”

“Doesn’t sound like your old man’s going to be too crazy about it either, then.”

“We do not not have to worry about my father,” she said. “Not anymore.”

“That so?”

She took her hat off and set it on her leg. It was an old hat. It belonged once to my cousin Rich. My old man gave it to Martha Knox. He steamed a new shape into it over a coffee pot one morning, put a neat crease in the top. The hat fit her. It suited her.

“Now listen, Buck,” she said. “This is a good story, and you’ll like it. My dad grew Christmas trees. Not a lot of them. He grew exactly fifty Christmas trees and he grew them for ten years. In our front yard. Trimmed them all the time with kitchen scissors, so they were pretty, but only about this tall.”

Martha Knox held her hand about three feet off the ground.

“Problem is we lived in the country,” she went on. “Everybody had woods in their back yards. Nobody ever bought a Christmas tree in that place. So this wasn’t a good business idea, fifty perfect trees. No big money there. But that’s what he did, and my mom worked.” She took her hat off her leg and put it back on. “Anyway. He opened up for business last December and nobody showed up and he thought that was pretty damn weird, because they were such nice trees. He went out drinking. Me and my sister, we cut down maybe twenty of the fuckers. Threw them in the station wagon. Drove an hour to the highway, started flagging down cars and giving trees away. Anyone who stops gets a free tree. It was like . . . Well, hell. It was like Christmas.”

Martha Knox found a cigarette in her coat pocket and lit it.

“Now,” she said. “We drive home. There’s my dad. He pushes Agnes down and hauls off and punches me in the face.”

“He ever hit you before?” I asked, and she shook her head.

“And he never will again, either.”

She looked at me, cool and even. I looked at her smoking her cigarette two thousand miles from home, and I thought about her shooting the goddamn coffee can six times, and we were quiet for a long time before I said, “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

She didn’t look away and she didn’t answer fast, but she said, “Yeah. I killed him.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said finally. “Jesus son-of-a-bitching Christ.”

Martha Knox handed the bottle to me, but I didn’t take it. She came over beside me and sat down. She put her hand on my leg.

“Jesus Christ,” I said again. “Jesus son-of-a-bitching Christ.”

She sighed. “Buck,” she said. “Honey.” She patted my leg and then she nudged me. “You are the most gullible man I know on this planet.”

“Fuck you.”

“I shot my dad and buried him in the compost pile. Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“Fuck you, Martha Knox.”

She got up and sat down on the other side of the fire again. “It was a great night, though. Lying in the driveway on my back with a bloody nose. I knew I was out of there.”

She handed me the bottle again, and this time I drank. We did not talk for a long time, but we finished off the bottle, and when the fire got low, Martha Knox put more wood on it. I had my feet so close to the flames that the soles of my boots started to smoke, so I moved back, but not much. In October up there it isn’t easy to be warm and I would not pull away from that kind of heat too fast.

There were bells from the meadow of horses moving but not leaving, grazing bells ringing, good bells. I could have named every horse out there and guessed who every horse was standing next to because of the way they liked to pair, and I could have told how each horse rode and how its mother and father rode, too. There were elk out there, still, but they were moving lower, like the horses wanted to move, for better food. Bighorn sheep and bear and moose were out there, too, all of them moving down, and I was listening for all of them. This night was clear. No clouds, except the fast clouds of our own breath, gone by the next breath, and it was bright from an almost finished moon.

“Listen,” I said, “I was thinking of going for a ride.”

“Now?” Martha Knox asked, and I nodded, but she had already known that I meant now, yes, now. Before she’d even asked, she was already looking at me and weighing things, mostly the big rule of my old man, which was this: no joyriding during work, not ever. No play-riding, no night-riding, no dare-riding, no dumb-riding, no risk-riding, not ever, not, most of all, during hunting camp. Before she’d even asked,
“Now?” she’d thought of that, and she’d thought also that we were tired and drunk. There were hunters asleep in the tent behind her, and she thought of that, too. And I had also thought of all that.

“Okay,” she said.

“Listen,” I said, and I leaned in closer to the fire which was between us. “I was thinking of going up Washakee Pass tonight.”

I watched her. I knew she’d never been out that far, but she knew what it was, because Washakee was the only way for miles in any direction to get over the Continental Divide and into the middle of the Rockies. My brother Crosby called it the Spine. It was narrow and iced, and it pushed thirteen thousand feet, but it went over and in, and Martha Knox had not ever gone that far.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Well, listen. I was thinking of not stopping there.”

She didn’t stop looking at me, and she didn’t change her expression, which was the expression of a good hunter watching for a good shot coming. Then I told her.

“We take a pack horse each and whatever food and gear fits on them. I ride Stetson, you ride Jake, and we don’t come back.”

“I’ll ride Handy.”

“Not that spotted-ass cocksucker.”

“I’ll ride Handy,” she said again, and I had forgotten that she had talked my old man into selling her that crazy horse.

“Okay. But he’s all wrong for this.”

“What about the hunters?”

“They’ll be fine, if they don’t freak out.”

“They’ll freak out.”

“They’ll be fine.”

“Talk about a bunch of pilgrims, Buck,” she said. “These guys have never even been in a back yard.”

“If they’re smart, they’ll hike out tomorrow as soon as they
figure we’re gone. The trail’s marked like a goddamn freeway. They’ll be fine. The soonest they’ll get to the ranch is tomorrow night, late. The soonest the forest service could come after us is the next day. If we ride straight, we could be ninety miles south by then.”

“Tell me you’re dead serious,” Martha Knox said. “Because I’ll do this.”

“I figure four or five days until we get to the Uinta range, and if they don’t catch us before then, they’ll never catch us.”

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

“Then we head south. And we’ll have to, because of winter. There’s no reason in the world we shouldn’t be in Mexico in a few months.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Jesus Christ. I’ve got it all figured out. Jesus son-of-a-bitching Christ. We’ll steal cattle and sheep and sell them at all those puny mountain outfits where nobody ever asks any questions.”

“Buck,” she said.

“And we’ll ride into all those puny foothill towns in Utah and Wyoming and we’ll hold up their banks. On horseback.”

“Buck,” she said again.

“It must be a hundred years since anyone held up a bank on goddamn horseback. They won’t know how to deal with us. They’ll be chasing us in cars, and there we go, over the guard-rails, back up the mountains with all that cash. Gone.”

“Buck,” she said, and I still didn’t answer, but this time I stopped talking.

“Buck,” she said. “You’re just full of shit, aren’t you?”

“I figure we can last four or five months before we finally get gunned down.”

“You’re just full of shit. You’re not going anywhere.”

“You think I wouldn’t do something like that?”

“I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“You think I wouldn’t do that?”

“You want to take off with some horses and see if we get made dead out there? Fine, I’m all for that. But don’t waste my time with this outlaw bullshit.”

“Come on,” I said. “Come on, Martha Knox.”

“You’re just limited. Limited.”

“You wouldn’t just take off like that anyway.”

She looked at me like she was going to say something mean and mad, but instead she got up and poured the coffee over what was left of the fire to put it out.

“Come on, Martha Knox,” I said.

She sat down again, but I couldn’t see her well in the new dark, over the wet ash.

“Don’t waste my time like that again,” she said.

“Come on. You can’t just take off like that.”

“The hell I can’t.”

“You would’ve just stolen my old man’s horses?”

“Handy is my goddamn horse.”

“Come on, Martha Knox,” I said, but she stood up and went into the tent behind me. Then the tent was lit from inside, the way it was on mornings before the sun was up, when she would make day packs for the hunt, and from the meadow where I was starting to saddle I would see the tent glowing, but barely, because it was just one lantern she used.

I waited, and she came out of the tent with that lantern. She also had a bridle, taken from the hook by the cook stoves where we hung all the bridles, so that the bits would not be frozen with dew, so the bits would not be ice in the horses’ mouths in the mornings. She walked past me toward the meadow. She walked fast like always, and, like always, she walked like a boy.

I went after her. I stumbled on a loose rock, and I caught her arm. “You’re not taking off by yourself,” I said.

“Yes, I am. I’m going to Mexico. In the middle of the night. Just me and this bridle.”

Then she said, “I’m kidding, Buck,” even though I hadn’t answered her.

I held her arm and we walked. The ground was rough, wet in some parts and in other parts covered with thin snow. We tripped ourselves up on rocks and fell into each other but didn’t fall over, and the lantern helped some. We followed bells until we were with the horses. Martha Knox set the lantern on a stump. We looked at the horses and they looked at us. Some of them moved away, moved sideways or back from us. But Stetson came over to me. I put my hand out and he sniffed at it and set his chin on it. He moved off and bent to graze again, and the bell around his neck rang like that move had been important, but the bells rang always, and it was nothing.

Martha Knox was in the horses, saying the things we always say to horses, saying, “Hey, there, steady now, easy buddy,” like the words get understood, when really it’s only the voice that matters, and the words could be any words.

She found Handy and I watched her bridle him. I watched him let her bridle him, and the spots over his back and rump in the almost dark were ugly, like accidental spots, like mistakes. I went over and she was talking to Handy and buckling the bridle by his ear.

I said, “You know my old man got this horse from its owner for a hundred dollars, the guy hated it so bad.”

“Handy’s the best. Look at those pretty legs.”

“My old man says they should’ve named him Handful.”

“Should’ve named him Handsome,” she said, and I laughed, but I laughed too loud, and Handy jerked his head back.

“Easy there,” she told him. “Steady now; easy boy.”

“You know why Indians rode appaloosas into battle?” I asked.

“Yes. I do.”

“So they’d be good and pissed off when they got there.”

Martha Knox said, “You want to take a guess how many times I’ve heard that joke this summer?”

“I hate an appaloosa. I hate them all.”

She stood next to Handy and ran her palm down his spine. She took the reins and a bunch of mane and pushed herself up on him, fast, just like I’d taught her in June. He danced back a few steps, but she reined him, she touched his neck, she stopped him.

“You coming or not?” she asked.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to ride that spotted-ass cocksucker.”

“Get up here.”

“He won’t take two bareback.”

“He’ll take two. Get up here.”

“Steady boy,” I said, and got myself up on him, behind Martha Knox. He danced sideways before I was settled, but this time she let him dance and then she kicked him and he was in a loose trot already while I was reaching around her waist with both arms, reaching for handfuls of mane. She let him trot and then he slowed and walked. She let him walk where he wanted to, and he circled the lantern twice and lazy. He sniffed at a mare, who moved fast from him. He walked to a tree and stood under it, still.

“Hell of a ride,” I said.